secret history: artemis rising
by darklight ascendant
Summary: a condense of a project that i'm working on, this was made to the standards of a literary bet and therefore may seem a little constrained. learn about how artemis came to be the inhuman evil that he is.


**secret history: artemis awakening**

  


I

_"I looked the school bully in the face. His thin, vampiric smile normally had no effect on me. But today, his gaze was a leer that brought out potent guilt and recrimination from within my psyche._

_"A cosmetic company gave – of all things – a crate of nail-polish remover to our teachers today in honour of Teachers' day. Don't ask me why. I do not know myself. But that morning, as the principal was about to announce the gift proudly and distribute it in grand, public fashion, an aide came to his side and whispered in his ear. The worry seemed to spread from his aide's face to his. The school bully winked at me._

_"The school was turned upside-down in search of the missing nail-polish remover. Eventually they found it portioned out and stashed in the tables of three enormously popular cheerleaders. The cheerleaders obviously denied prior knowledge; but who could argue with physical evidence?_

_"The school bully could have. That morning, he had bamboozled the delivery people into letting him take the goods into the office. They thought he was doing them a favour; he knew he was doing himself an errand. A vicious errand of vengeance. After all, the girls had spurned him one too many times. He'd make them pay. Of course they would have stolen cosmetics, he convinced the already incensed teachers. The girls were sent away from the prestigious private school._

_"But that is only secondary. What matters is that I did not stop him. I was there early that morning, and I saw every malicious step of his plan executed. I did not – could not – raise even a finger to stop him or defend the girls. And he knew!_

_"That was the power he now held over me. And I could not bear it. Against all the behest of my mind, I lashed out angrily at him, aiming my punch at his nose. My fist came away bloody, but a thousand fragments of him still leered, tenacious, at me through the broken mirror._

_"I was the school bully."_

  


The teacher read my essay with a voice that faltered between amazement and fear. I usually have that effect on people. They think I am just a thirteen-year old child. But my vocabulary, among other things, is that of an adult. Of Artemis Fowl, no less.

She finished. She could not put her finger on the right comment to say. I think I would have liked "Prodigious!". But all she said after the half-minute's hesitation was "Interesting," before hurrying on to the next essay. The class had learnt not to stare at me with the look of wary awe the way they had on my first day here. Besides, they probably thought it was some convenient fiction, thought up to ease my already comfortable position in the class standings. They were justified to think so, I thought. Children.

But I knew that my story was non-fiction. I _was_ the school bully. It was, in fact, the reason I came to this school. My mother had insisted. My father was forced to sign the letter at knife-point – such was my mother's family background – all the while grinning at my escapade. He would still joke now and then about it. "Quite worthy of a Mafia, my boy!" He still joked about it up till the day he threw back his Mafia background, till the day he boarded the ship, never to return. It was the only thing that could make him laugh.

Now, I worried. I had always operated from a perspective that praised the school bully as a hero. Not a wounding brigand to be held back. A change of mindset like this could not be good for me.

  


Artemis sat by himself at the pavilion. He hated football, and he was very good at making up exotic diseases, among other things. As he watched his peers play mindlessly, he thought about things. His recent essay's soft-heartedness. His mother's healing. His father's absence. About People. About Holly, Root.

A tremor flickered in the corner of his eye, as if his field of vision was being rattled like a projection on a piece of cheap canvas. Suddenly, he had never feared this much before. His view faded black for a second, and then the view of boys' football came back to him – 

There was... a change. He dropped from fear into strangeness. It seemed that everything around him had more... _content_. He could not pinpoint the difference (or he would have), but he found a pleasing analogy: like passing from a crude crayon colouring into a land of oils and watercolours.

_Who are you?_

He was speaking to himself? ...

_It's been a while, you psycho!_

_But... what's happening?_

The sky was flickering, flitting between varying shades of blue, and his head felt like water, gradually rising to fill air, was sloshing around within it.

_You will remember._

But still he knew not, and therefore he intuited. The outside environment was still the same, but his perception was changing. "Any sensory input from the environment must be interpreted by my senses first." But his eyes, his ears, surely had not changed. "Then they must be compared with previous memories to be evaluated..." He dared not ponder the conclusion in light of his knowledge of the People.

_This must be a mind-wipe after-effect. Something has changed the configuration of a mind-wipe on me. Foaly said a strong enough stimulus could undo one. But..._

An e-mail arrived for him. There was a video with a man, bound, in an icy wasteland under a starry sky. Had he received it the day before, he would not have recognized the man; even if he had, he would not have bothered with him. The fairy gold richened him and hardened his heart. 

But now, he knew that he would implore even the People to help his father.

Of course, he hadn't expected them to come knocking. 

  


II

"D'Arvit! What's with the trombone notes in that bloody music?"

"Avant-garde, my hooves. More like "I vant a guard – to stop me from writing crappy music!"

There in the bar, two of probably only three People who even bothered about Artemis Fowl any more, Julius Root and Foaly the centaur talked among revellers who drank never-ending rivers of wine. "Holly would have done something about that music, yes she would, if she had walked in here the high-headed Artemis-facing-hero she was fifty years ago." Someone vomited somewhere. "But no, she's now the very head of LEPrecon! Too good for these cheap places."

"The last time we talked," Foaly reminisced, "she was preparing for the handover ceremony. I asked her about Artemis. She EXPLODED at me! Words like 'I don't ever want to hear of him again!' Truth be told, she still had a thing for him then. Don't know about now, though. Maybe the decades of drowning herself in work have really put out that spark. Elves, you bloody emotional creatures."

"That's my successor. Who else could I nominate?" A still moment, as if an unspeakable barrier was being approached. "So," a nervous turn-away from _her_, "how about your successor?"

"Hmph! Simply because I had no-one else to had Tech over to... he's good, but not half as good as _he_ was." And Julius knew who the unnamed one was. "If Bwa'Kell happened again, he'd probably surrender! There'd be nothing better for him to do."

"That incompetent?"

"Just in comparison to me. I am, after all, the best there is."

The old cliché evoked no laugh from Julius. They had known each other too long. He poked, undesiring, at a lukewarm stew in front of him on the bar-top. "Things just aren't what they were. Bwa'Kell ...best challenge of my career. If these modern goons had been in the hot-seat, today Haven would be Opal and Briar's domain."

"Sigh... Artemis."

"Artemis."

They were talking about him again, as they had again and again throughout the century. That was his hold on the People who had known him. 

"As much as I hated him, I... didn't mind. He brought life to our lives, didn't he?"

"Oh he did. Like the time he tripped Sentinel just to save Butler."

"He was always one with luck. If Holly hadn't been there, Butler would've been gone. And if it hadn't been Holly there, he'd probably have gotten a field wipe straight-away."

"But he got wiped in the end."

The atmosphere was dull, and the revellers' party gags sounded far away in their distracted ears. It had always been this way when they talked with Artemis or about him. There was some psychic hold he had on them. Perhaps they simply missed him too much. Foaly coughed nervously.

"Maybe we shouldn't have."

"You think so too, don't you? But when the report came in from the guys at Psycho –" another old cliché, another awkward silence, "– my hands were tied. I couldn't suborn."

"I've been looking through his memories."

"Ah."

"Or more accurately, I've tried. They are very convoluted. The data content in his brain is crazy... He records the world around him in lifelikeness. His pictures are pictures of billions of billions of pixels, in a trillion hues. Like a computer, without the emotional baggage attached to each memory that normally makes it so easy to read the data dumps. Not at all like it was the last time."

Silence.

"You remember, don't you?"

Julius didn't want to. "D'Arvit, I can't imagine anyone else who's ever been wiped twice."

"The little twerp," Foaly's memories soaked his voice in anger, "he actually _wanted_ to be wiped."

  


III

"Come in," so clearly a boy's voice! "Come in, but do not harm me bodily." Julius and Foaly stopped short on the doorstep, as did the Tech sprites hauling their gear up the avenue under cover of night. The damn genius could actually see them.

They were shielded. It hadn't made much difference.

  


There was already an empty space in the middle of the main hall. The sprites gratefully started setting up what looked like a TV-sized server unit where the furniture had been moved away. Julius and Foaly came in last in the entourage, after the precious few Recon members they had pried off official business had scouted the room and sighted all the possible sniper hideouts. They were cautious.

And on a couch positioned to one side of the space, _he_ was seated. Fidgeting, Foaly noticed.

_He's just ten,_ he said in Gnommish to Julius. _Just a boy_.

_Fine,_ Julius responded. _Take pity on him._

  


In the centre of the room stood an elf and a centaur. Neither taller than six feet, they nevertheless exuded an austerity that belied their stature. And they held my destiny. I hoped that they would finally exorcise the demon from within me.

And if they couldn't, it was nice meeting them anyway.

I had become evil – when? - about two years ago. I was already precocious. But I had not become the mastermind criminal I am. That part of me awakened sometime ago, when I was nine...

My father was reading the newspaper. He never read it for leisure, as typical people do; he absorbed knowledge like a sponge in water. But that day, a queer comment came from his lips: 

"Some bastard immigrants again."

What I knew of it was that there was a war, somewhere in Eastern Europe, and people were fleeing like sparks from a fire. Suddenly, I replied, "Then send them away!"

I had not been this evil before. But my father looked at me with a perverse pride.

_What? Why? _I asked.

And I answered, _They're useless. They're parasites on a land they don't deserve._

_But they are to be pitied!_

_The weak pity. But it is the strong who survive._

_I'm ashamed to be thinking this way!_

_But I'm not you, even though I share this body. I am... improved._

_Where did you come from?_

_You don't need to know._

_The immigrants..._

_Just let them die._

_But wait! They are assets! They are people who have the will to run away._

_Isn't that weakness for you?_

_Not when it would be easier to sulk and die._

_True._

And my mouth opened again. "Actually, Father, I'd have them stay. They'd have to deserve it, though."

  


..."You're the boy, right? The one who posted the first page of the Book?"

Artemis awakened from dark memories. "Yes. My... mind is becoming evil. Please help me! Change my personality, kill off the evil part of my mind."

"What were you thinking, boy? What if we had simply decided to wipe away all memories about us, the People?"

"Then I wouldn't remember the deactivation code for the P2P virus that would spread a video of an unshielded fairy completing the Ritual all over the Internet. I told you about it. It's in a Gnommish variant, which you would obliterate from my mind if you just made it as if fairies don't exist."

"Well, how do you know a whole five years of your life won't just vanish from your memory?"

"Aren't you guys supposed to be super-technologically advanced or something?"

"This particular technology is still untested."

"Just do it ! Please!"

"Alright."

  


IV

They restrained him on a modified stretcher and attached electrodes to his temple. The electrodes ran through the server unit and out onto a plasma screen. Artemis saw his thoughts flashing onto the screen in green Gnommish letters. He began to feel afraid.

The technicians clapped sleep goggles onto his head and knocked him out. The lines of Gnommish on the screen, once whizzing from left to right blindingly, now slowed. Stopped. Artemis was unconscious.

But deep in his subconscious, in the arena of the age-old battle between Good and Evil, combatants were stirring.

Foaly pulled out a keyboard from the server. But before he could type a single command, he glanced once at the screen and blanched. The Gnommish lines were moving again. From left to right. From right to left too this time. The screen flickered, then paled as if power was being suctioned away. Foaly slumped, stony in silence.

Julius' face turned his trademark red. "SPEAK TO ME, FOALY!" he roared. "WHAT'S HAPPENING?"

"We're not inputting, Commander. He's doing IO through the server. D'Arvit, he's actually building and manipulating programs and subroutines inside. Changing BIOS settings, overriding the interface with his own imperatives – "

"GNOMMISH!"

"D'Arvit. He's taken control!"

  


His subconscious was an arena. A dark, black-hooded figure loomed over a little boy, clothed in glowing-white raiment.

_Don't you dare._

_You won't be missed, you weakling! You pitier!_

_Come, then, let us battle!_

_But you don't know what you've given me._

_This technology will help me get rid of you._

_Don't you realize that I actually was the one who gave you the idea to capture the fairy on video? Don't you see that _I_ also had a motive in doing so?_

_What are you trying to say?_

_You're not going to wipe me. I'm going to wipe you._

__The dark figure looked upwards, as if signalling. A shield grew from the back of his left hand, a heavy plate of brass five feet long and two feet wide. He made a pulling motion with his right hand, and a sword – first an incandescently green hilt, then a gleaming-silver blade – answered.

_NO!_

_If Father could see us, he would be proud of me. Not you._

  


"...The electrodes use controlled charges to isolate particular neurons that hold the information we want to erase, so that the brain won't backup the information elsewhere while we are doing the wipe. Then we use more charges to coalesce the neurons, collapsing the synapses and destroying the information content."

"But? Foaly, you're supposed to be the best."

"This was modified from an experimental mind-communication rig. Not enough time. So, information still flows both ways. His information has hijacked my server, because I left the inputs open and unguarded. To think a ten-year-old Mud Boy just hacked my system. D'Arvit!"

"What does that mean?"

"He's gained control of the mind-wipe mechanism. He's doing the wiping, not me. And he's wiping away all the virtues you can think of: love, kindness, compassion..."

"So, what do we do about it?"

"Wait." Foaly's eyes narrowed on a particular string that hovered on the screen. "Ah. He has set up wards against a counter-hack. That's bad and good. For now, I cannot counter-hack him to release his control. But because he is watching me with the wards, he will tire quickly. Then I will cut off the input link."

"Do it!"

"But, Commander, what next? I've been watching the data streams. His bad side has just about eradicated his good side. He will wake up a hardened criminal. More tenaciously evil than any goblin in Howler's Peak. And he will know of the People."

"If you wipe the People from his mind, the Internet will be filled with Holly's video."

"No, it won't. I read the password from his mind. Commander Root, do I have the go-ahead to –"

"DO WHATEVER IT TAKES!"

Just then, the wards weakened.

  


_I have finished my work here._ The figure walked away from the body of the little boy, whose clothes had become stained crimson with blood. Unthinking, he put down his shield and flung the gleaming silver sword back into the nether from which he had plucked it.

... A thousand swords rained back down, piercing the vulnerable personality. This time, _he _was being wiped. Of all knowledge of the People.

  


V

"Butler just started on his way back. Half an hour to the wipe."

Foaly was logged on to a computer in the Fowl manor. "Aha! Commander, a data dump." He could imagine Julius grinning on the other side of the intercom – Artemis, the great genius, outsmarted by the People. "Commence deleting."

"Get it right this time, Foaly. Our careers depend on it."

"Yes, sir. I know where I made the mistake last time."

"Don't let there be another sighting, a year from now."

"Yes, sir. I'll do the wipe properly." - _even though you know I don't want to._

"I'll be there V.C. I've told the Tech fellows already."

_Video-conference? _Foaly thought. _Your face better not betray that we're all going to miss him._

  


... Foaly studied the images. "Way too early," he announced. "Calibrate them to sixteen months ago. Actually, make that about three years. I don't want Artemis planning his initial kidnap all over again."

"Bravo, Foaly," said Artemis bitterly. "I was hoping you might miss that."

_Again? No way. _Foaly smirked. And sighed inside. _Mind-wiping Artemis again..._

  


"Argon! How can you be so selfish?"

"It's for the good of the race. For the good of the People. One Mud Man's life doesn't matter."

"Didn't you get Foaly's transcript? His personality transformed so radically because an earlier mind-wipe came undone."

"And?"

"You want to mind-wipe him again?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Argon... you know the theories. Another mind-wipe would reinstate his first mind-wipe. Both will always be equally strong. If he doesn't remember the People, his good personality will be gone."

"He has his family. The Butlers."

"His first awakening came in spite of that. So could his second."

"Well, that's just too bad. Anyway, the People cannot get too close to the Mud Men."

"Why would you think that? Don't tell me your heart has been broken by a Mud Girl, Argon." An old tabloid cliché.

But he was hurt. "Hey... whatever. To befriend the Mud Men will weaken the People."

"Still, it doesn't have to be so extreme, to the point that forty percent of LEPrecon recruits sign up just for the pleasure of mind-wiping Mud Men."

"I... the decision's final. There's no time to tell Tech to stop."

"What? Commander Julius just left for the V.C. That means that the Tech People there just started setting up. When he gets to the V.C., they won't even have started. We still have about fifteen minutes."

"The decision's FINAL!"

"Argon, you're just as bad as the Mud Men."

  


A thousand gleaming silver swords flooded the recesses of Artemis' mind...

A dark figure laughed. A boy cried out.

  



End file.
